


The Sky With Its Silence, the Sky With Its Light

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence (offstage), Established Relationship, Ethical Dilemmas, Force-Sensitive Finn, Friendship, Love in a season of death, Loyalty, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, People in this say "fuck" a lot but all actual fucking is offstage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 08:21:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8242699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: When his duties in Intelligence allow, Finn practices with Rey and Skywalker. His Force-awareness has served him and Poe more than once in the field, and it's worth developing for that reason alone. Not that they've been in the field together much recently: the Resistance and what's left of the Fleet have joined forces to hammer the First Order in old Imperial space. But if they go back out together—when—any edge will be useful.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Artifactrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artifactrix/gifts).



> I wanted to have another try at writing Rey, who I feel I often shortchange. I wanted to show the continuation and unfolding of the respect and delight that began on the decks of a stolen freighter, and the loyalty that brought Finn back to the place he feared the most. I wanted to show Finn and Poe's relationship at a crossroads, and I wanted to at least touch on some of the other relationships that sustain and complicate their lives.
> 
> The title is from _Alphabet_ by Inger Christiansen.
> 
> This is for Artifactrix, who wrote Finn so well in "Careful What It Is You Say", and whose comments on love in wartime are always so wise. Credit for _Lunar Sowing_ is due, like so much else, to gloss.

In the Resistance, there are a few ways to move in together. If you and the sentient of your desiring both share rooms, you can engineer a simple trade--this strategy has resulted in some surprising friendships and a few lasting enmities—or embark on a more complex geometry of switches and displacements. You can go to the quartermaster and request a double, which can take weeks (morale is morale, but this is nobody's priority) and has no benefit except the soothing balm of knowing you've followed procedure.

Or if one of you has a single—let's say, because that one is a commander who also has a loud, obnoxious droid and a history of violently interrupted sleep--you can drag a bed out of the other one's room and put the two beds together widthways so nobody falls in the crack. Then all you have to wheedle out of the quartermaster is a set of larger sheets.

When Poe is away and Finn's on base, he sometimes tries to sleep in their bed, but it's lonely and lopsided and he hates it. So he often decamps to the bunkhouse, a hangar-like structure built to accommodate the habits of species and cultures for whom sleep is communal rather than private. The sound of bodies stirring involuntarily, the faint metallic echo, are soothing to Finn in ways he's made his peace with. It's just enough like stormtrooper barracks, and just different enough, to let him rest.

On other nights, especially if he's lost track of time on a task or if a meeting or debriefing runs late and he wants to reduce the number of people he's waking, he passes the bunkhouse and walks down a woods path to a lean-to set up in a clearing, where a little fire or a warm light is usually burning. Rey feels him coming—she's awake, she's always awake--and calls out, “Hi,” when he's within range of her voice.

No one was about to tell the young Jedi, Luke Skywalker's student and last best hope for the galaxy, feral-toothed and lean-muscled and lethal, that she couldn't make her own sleeping arrangements with the forest. She built the lean-to out of saplings and scrap, lined it with the trinkets that seem to find their way into her hands and the restless little motion machines, not sentient enough to be droids, that she makes from parts. Her blanket situation, she's freely admitted to Finn, is better by orders of magnitude than anything she ever had on Jakku.

Her efforts to sleep with a roommate, or even on a corridor, had...not worked out. But she reaches an arm out to Finn, smiles at him, says, “Come in.” Sometimes they talk for a while—his reports, her confusion, his confusion, her training, things they're proud of or things they've noticed that delight them—and sometimes she just pats the blanket nest she's made, waits for him to get settled and lies down beside him.

He learned to sleep in enforced company. She learned to sleep in enforced isolation. He isn't sure why he's the exception, but in the lean-to, in the forest's night noises and the smells of lichen and smoke and trees exhaling oxygen, they sleep well together.

 

*

 

The reports come in, and he looks for patterns, and he tells the rest of the Intelligence division, or sometimes the admirals and the General directly, what he sees. When the squadrons are out, he eats with engineers Hy and Ollal, or Asfa from Intelligence, or alone. Every now and again he has a re-re-rematch of _Lunar Sowing_ with Grisha Askinash, who came up through the Academy with Poe before losing an eye and learning to repair ships instead of flying them, and has lots of stories to tell. He jacks off in the fresher and sleeps in their bed only when he needs to remind himself what Poe smells like. He doesn't, other things being equal, sleep much.

And when his duties allow, he practices with Rey and Skywalker-- “Luke, Luke is fine,” but Finn can't quite bring himself to say it. He thinks all the moving-rocks-around part of it is sort of stupid, but they've both explained to him—Skywalker gravely, Rey with a glint in her eye—that it's like stretching or strength training, developing reflexes and pathways that will allow him to access the Force easily and naturally. His Force-awareness has served him and Poe more than once in the field, and it's worth developing for that reason alone. Not that they've been in the field together much recently: the Resistance and what's left of the Fleet have joined forces to hammer the First Order in old Imperial space. But if they go back out together—when—any edge will be useful.

He also enjoys, he's always enjoyed, getting better at things. While his progress is slower and fuller of setbacks and stalls than he'd like, he can feel himself getting better at touching the Force when he reaches for it. Rey describes it as a great wind that blows through her rather than against her, but that's not what it's like for him: it's more like a glowing map of everything that stretches out from where he stands. Skywalker says this is normal, that different people have different leanings in the Force and know it in different ways. He doesn't say what it's like for him.

Today after practice, Rey takes Finn's hand and says with undisguised eagerness, “Let's go get some food,” and they walk across the base together. He still loves watching her face change as she tastes and satisfaction cross her expression when she swallows, the eagerness with which she says of some fairly ordinary food item that's been in the mess for three tendays straight, “Try this, it's amazing.”

Other people are watching her too, Finn knows without looking—watching them. A couple of the pilots have already asked, in tones that are ready to turn threatening at a moment's notice, “So, you and Rey?”

He knows what they mean, but he asks, “Me and Rey what?” because people still, after almost a standard year, expect that kind of question from him. It's better to let them reveal their own positions. Sometimes they say, “Never mind,” like if he doesn't know what they're talking about, he can't possibly be doing it.

Rey goes back for more practice, and Finn goes to the evening strategy session. He delivers his report, collated from a dozen others, and tries to concentrate while the admirals wrangle about the best place to direct their next attack and whether to put more people on the new infiltration campaign. Normally he gets some satisfaction out of keeping everything in his head, listening more than he weighs in but ready to comment if he's asked or if they overlook something obvious. All of this matters, lives and not just lives are at stake, they're talking about where to send Poe next, and he's pinching his thigh under the table to stay focused. “Sorry,” he says.

Rishy passes him a glass of water and Asfa gives him a sympathetic eye-roll. “The squadrons are due back within the day,” Statura says. “That should help your concentration.” Finn looks at him, trim and glossy and tucked in; his tone was pleasant, as it often is when he's at his most cutting. He's heard rumors that Poe and Statura had something going a while back; if it's true, he wonders if that makes Statura feel any kind of way about working with him now. He manhandles his attention back to the decisions they're trying to make.

When the meeting's over, there's no point in going to bed, and he goes to the lean-to. “Hi,” she says. “You can't sleep again?”

“Waiting for the squadrons. They're due in tonight, or tomorrow. I don't have to stay, if you're tired.”

“No,” she says with a shiver. “I'm awake. Put a little more wood on the fire, I'll get us blankets.”

“Nice job in practice today,” he says when they're settled. She says nothing, sits stiffly. “You're worried about something. What are you worried about?”

“Oh,” she says, shrugging, “same as always. Having to fight Kylo Ren again. Not being good enough. He'll be training too, you know, he'll be stronger in the Dark than last time. Beating him back like that was a fluke, and I know it, and he knows it. And Luke knows it too, even though he won't say.”

“What else can you do? To get ready?”

“Luke says just keep practicing. But he couldn't stop Ben—stop Kylo Ren before. What if he's wrong about what I need to learn?”

Finn doesn't have an answer to that question, so it's maybe just as well—at least for him—that they hear the roar of displaced air overhead. He leaps to his feet, then checks himself and looks back down at Rey.

“I'm fine,” she says, not sounding fine. “Just brooding. I'll be okay. Go to your man.” This, she always says with a kind of affectionate scorn. “I'll see you tomorrow at practice.”

Finn takes off at a run down the familiar forest path, his steps crunching twigs and scuffing leaves until he breaks out onto packed dirt and then the poured duracrete of the landing field. Jessika and Bastian are already down and clambering out past their ground crew, slapping hands and the occasional ass, so things must've gone well. Then Poe's X-wing sinks gracefully and slows and stops, and Poe unbends himself, not gracefully at all, but in the way that never fails to clutch at Finn's heart. He climbs down, pries off his helmet, sees Finn, comes toward him.

Finn's arms, all his senses, are full of Poe, sweaty hair, creaking flight suit, eager mouth. “Hey,” he says mid-kiss.

“Hey.”

“Room?”

“Oh hell yes,” Poe says, swinging away only to sling an arm around Finn's waist and tug him in the right direction. Finn remembers to ask, “Debriefing? You don't have to go out again?”

“Snap knows everything I know, and I couldn't go out again now if I wanted to. We brought 'em down on fumes. Walk faster.”

 

*

 

Poe's already up when Finn wakes. It's like that for the next few days: if they see each other at all it's in passing, crossing the base, punching each other's shoulders like they used to do, before. Once, they duck into a side hallway and kiss for a few desperate, dizzying minutes before prying apart and heading to their separate destinations, aching.

Meetings feel long. Practice feels longer, and his progress seems to have stalled out. Rey's edginess continues, and while Skywalker doesn't get impatient, Finn gets the feeling that he would be getting impatient if he were someone else. She drops things, swears, stalks around the clearing for long minutes to walk her anger off.

“Why don't we switch to sparring,” Finn suggests. “With the sticks?” Skywalker took his father's lightsaber back, and Rey doesn't have one of her own, and Finn doesn't want one. Rey glares at him, but gets the practice sticks from where they're leaning in the corner, and they fight.

Watching her, every move spare and melodic and essential, it's easy to see how she inhabits the Force, knows and feels herself as part of it. He holds his own for a while, but she eventually hands him his ass, and it seems to cheer her up. If he's being honest, it cheers him up too. It's good to move, good to _act._ He's been reading too many reports.

But he has to go and read some more, and he doesn't get back to the room till late. Poe's there when he gets in, smack in the middle of the bed, half-curled. Finn undresses and fits himself into the C-shape Poe makes, and Poe puts an arm around him without waking.

“Tighter,” Finn says, just a breath. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This time Poe obliges, still without waking up all the way, locking his arm across Finn's chest, and Finn feels like he's where he's supposed to be, like they both are.

 

*

 

“Why aren't you with Poe,” Rey says, the next evening, instead of “Hi.”

“He's in the air. Night drills. You're mad at me.”

The night noises fill the space between them. “A little,” she says finally.

“You want me to leave?

“No, stay.” She crumples a big dried alolar leaf and throws it onto the fire, picks up another one and starts crumpling that. Finn sits beside her, at a little distance, and watches the sparks rise. After they've been quiet a minute, the night noises start up again, a low sound like someone drinking rapidly and a high buzzing whine that repeats, drops a tone, and repeats again. Finn wonders aloud who they are.

“Can you feel them?” Rey asks. “I bet you can, if you try.”

Finn opens his mind. Slowly, he gets a dim sense of the lives around them, the hot lights of little animals and the slower, cooler burn of plants and trees, with fine tenuous lines connecting them—water? Smell? Energy? Predation? They need to know, but he doesn't, and that's restful too, that seeing the connections is enough, without having to follow or manipulate or sever them. The night is laced with light and darkness, illuminated and shadowed. He's held in the net of it, Rey a blazing blue-white light beside him.

Her shoulder bumps his, the two kinds of awareness overlapping briefly, and, “Oh,” she says, “I can feel it so much better when--”

They sit like that, the round parts of their shoulders warm and solid against each other, until the rest of their skin chills and she shakes herself briskly and stands up. Finn goes back to the room to sleep. Poe is so deeply under that he doesn't stir when Finn gets in with him, and only then does Finn remember that he didn't ask Rey what she was mad about.

 

*

 

Poe says, “So during the debrief, I talked to the brass about doing more work in the field again.”

They woke up together, for a wonder. No time for sex, but at least they're eating breakfast together, Finn on his second bowl of porridge and Poe on his second cup of caf. Finn says, “Yeah?”

“Yeah, they've had me in flight a lot lately.” Finn knows this as well as Poe does himself, but he also knows that Poe knows that, so he doesn't say anything. “Which I get! Strike while the durasteel is hot, blah blah.”

“So why, then,” Finn asks, “any special reason?” He tries to think of intel that's come their way lately that Poe would be particularly good at following up, assignments that would appeal to him.

“Yeah. You can't fit two in an X-wing cockpit.”

“You wanna go out together again.” He can't keep the smile from spreading, has to actively remember to swallow the rest of the porridge.

“Only if you do,” Poe says quickly. “Seriously, only—you know we've been doing better, since you started working Intelligence? 'Better.'” A quick, bitter gesture. “Hitting more important targets, fewer civilian casualties, more people coming back in one piece. The works.”

“I don't think that's me,” Finn points out. “I mean, maybe I'm part of it, but if you mean no one else can do what I do, that's not true. You know yourself we're not set up like that. It's probably _good_ for me to be in the field again. Get a taste of what it's like, wouldn't want to get too complacent, think my hands are clean--” He stops because Poe has taken hold of the hands in question, spoon and all, and is kissing them.

“Hold on, though,” Poe says into his palm. “Don't say yes yet. I thought a long time about asking you, I really want you to think about it, you're safer here doing the desk stuff than you are getting shot at with me, I didn't want you to--”

“Poe.” He brings their hands back toward his own face, presses his lips down on the knuckle of Poe's thumb. “None of us are safe. I'd rather get shot at with you.”

Poe's mouth twists. “It's not exactly a getaway for two on Hesperidium.”

“I don't even know where that is. I'll talk to Rishy and them about who can take over what I'm doing. Maybe when Mehnaz gets back, she and Durosse have been in the field for a while—we don't have to go over this now.”

“No, let's go over it, I have a few minutes. Tell me what you're thinking. Love to watch that brain work.” They talk for a while about current operations and conditions, keeping their hands joined, watching each other's mouths, while Poe's caf cools and Finn's porridge turns to glue in the bottom of his bowl.

Later that day, Durosse comes back alone.

Mehnaz is dead. The First-Order-backed government arrested her on a false charge, and she died in jail. Durosse is pretty sure she killed herself rather than blow the rest of their network. “The thing about those wafers,” she says dully to the assembled Intelligence teams, “is if you use 'em, you never get to know if you used 'em too early. I think I could've got her out, but who the fuck knows, I barely got out myself.” Rishy, who's the best out of all of them of getting people to say what they know, working so gently and firmly that they don't even realize what they've said, leans forward and starts to extract what Durosse went to bring back, and what she was able to get done while she was there.

Mehnaz was an analyst as well as a field operative, but the two of them worked together for years, since long before Finn came to the Resistance. Durosse keeps talking in that dead voice, Rishy spinning the thread of information out of her. Finn feels adrift, disembodied, and reaches out with his Force-awareness the way he did in the forest, looking more for something to locate and anchor him than anything else.

He sees them like dimmer and brighter lights in a fog, sees the lines between them. Since they're sentient and he knows them, he can identify these—sort of retroactively—as loyalty, jealousy, impatience, long affection. Where do the lines between them and Mehnaz go now, Finn wonders, do they trail off into nothingness? Will they fade?

When they've got all they can, someone sends for Durosse's wife, a biologist who now works in the kitchens. The two of them leave together, and the rest of the team splits in half, one to redistribute Mehnaz's responsibilities and one to decide what to do with the new information. They work with the efficiency of anger tempered by exhaustion, and soon have a new plan in place. “Go unwind, everyone,” Statura says. “Eighteen hours mandatory respite. General Organa will let us know when Mehnaz's memorial will be.”

These are, mainly, hardened veterans of an ugly war, in some cases of two ugly wars. They don't stumble out; they walk. But they walk slowly. Finn watches them go, watches them blur.

“Put your head right down between your knees,” someone says, and he feels a hand, firm but not rough, on the back of his neck. Complying feels good, or less bad. Finn stays down for some amount of time, he isn't sure. When he sits up again because his back is starting to hurt, Statura is watching him, his expression tough to interpret.

“I sent her there,” Finn says. Distantly, he wonders why this is hitting him so hard. Recommendations he's made have, however indirectly, already sent Resistance fighters to their deaths, and caused even more deaths of stormtroopers and other First Order personnel. And he didn't know Mehnaz well. Maybe it's just seeing Durosse's face, hearing her flat voice.

“Welcome to the Resistance,” Statura says, still unreadable. “Get out of here, Finn. Eighteen hours, I don't want to see you back here.”

Finn feels newly shaken when he leaves the meeting room and it's twilight—when he entered, the sun was bright. His hips and steps shift into his old stormtrooper's gait, and he can't be bothered to do anything about it. He feels alone with his knowledge, anonymous, cut off.

But that's obviously not true. More to prove it than anything else, he stops by the mess—it's crowded, a lot of people eat around this time—and ladles himself a bowl of soup. “How you doing,” says Ollal, behind him in line.

“Shook up,” Finn says. “Thinking about Mehnaz.”

“Yeah, I heard from Siel.” Siel is Durosse's wife. “It's bad, that's all, just bad,” Ollal says, balancing the bowl on xir pincers and turning deftly to re-enter the crowd.

 _Welcome to the Resistance,_ Statura said. Welcome to the Resistance, where every death matters, because every life does _and_ because there are so few of us to die. Welcome to the Resistance, where everyone has to do and be so much that you never get to say it wasn't your fault.

He follows Ollal to a table and sits, watching xir dip xir proboscis in the soup—xe can talk and eat at the same time, and comments periodically on the low common denominator of food that has to satisfy multiple species' nutrition and needs. Finn understands this for what it is, and knows it doesn't require a response. He's grateful. When they're done eating Ollal, whose people don't go in for physical contact much outside mating or fighting, taps him lightly on the elbow and says again, “It's bad.”

“Yeah,” Finn says, “It is bad,” and Ollal nods, a gesture that even a human can read as satisfaction, and merges with the crowd again.

Welcome to the Resistance, where if you die, you die known, and mourned, and if you live, you have people to mourn with. The Resistance, where you'll probably die, and if you live, you'll have to live knowing that you were the exception.

 

*

 

He runs into Rey on the way out of the mess. “Something happened,” she says. “What happened?” Something must be showing on his face, because she says defensively, “I was training all day, I wasn't even _here_ in my mind, can you just tell me?” so he does.

She doesn't say, “It's bad,” or “I'm sorry,” or any of the other things that people seem to say. She says, “Come sit with me,” reaching for his hand, lacing their fingers together, drawing him along with her. It's full dark out; the moons are up. There's a chill in the air, and the shrill insect sound falls silent as they enter the forest, closing in again behind them.

Rey puts a blanket around his shoulders and gets the fire going, her hands industrious and her expression intent as the firestarter flares, then catches. “I'm gonna meditate a bit,” she says. “Do it with me?”

So they drop into the no-time of Force meditation together, and they emerge from it almost at the same moment with the fire burning down to coals. “Come inside and sleep,” she says. He follows her into the shelter, and she folds herself around him, the way Poe does at night, before tucking the blankets over both of them.

He wakes in the gray light of not-yet-dawn, filtering through the shelter's doorflap. It's too low for him to stand, but he extricates himself into a kind of half-crouch and tucks the covers back around her. For a long minute, he looks at her: she probably woke, she sleeps lightly, but she's either back asleep or pretending. “See you later,” he says softly, and kisses her forehead, and leaves.

Poe is awake when he gets back to their room. Awake, and dressed, and sitting on the bed. Finn's stomach sinks. “Are you okay?”

“Are you?”

“No,” Finn says. “Not really.”

“What I mean is,” Poe says, without turning all the way toward him, “I didn't know where you were. I didn't know where you'd gone, but I knew they killed Mehnaz, and I knew you were fucked up about it, because three different people told me and asked if I'd seen you, and I didn't know just _how_ fucked up, and I was--”

“I scared you,” Finn says, seeing Poe's stiff back and the places on his thumbs where he's picked them bloody. “Fuck, I'm sorry. I was just with Rey, I went to meditate with her and then we fell asleep. Poe, I'm so sorry, I should have let you know.”

“You're your own person,” Poe says. “You don't have to account to me for where you go and what you do. You don't owe me anything.”

It hadn't occurred to Finn to think of it that way, exactly. “I should've known that it'd worry you,” is all he can say. “I should've said something. I don't want you to feel like—how you feel right now. I mean, you can be angry, if angry is how you are. You can be however you are about it. I didn't keep you in mind. I'm really sorry.”

Poe turned toward him at _I didn't keep you in mind,_ and his face is more open now, softer around the mouth. “How fucked up are you?” he asks.

Finn takes stock. “Pretty bad. Meditating helped a little, but it all comes back. I think I just need time. But I don't want too _much_ time. I don't want to forget about her, you can understand that, right?”

“Yeah. I can understand that.” Poe pats the bed beside him. “Sit here,” he says. “If you want to.” Finn wants to, and does. “You still wanna go back in the field with me? After this?”

“More,” Finn says, “I want it more.”

Poe takes hold of him and pulls him close, and Finn moves with him. “What do you want more of,” Poe says, and Finn has this feeling like he's on the edge of something, but also like he's in the center of it, like he's _been_ in it, and is just recognizing it now. “You,” he says. “Everything. You.”

He only has to turn his head a little to kiss Poe's neck, and he does that again and again, breathing him in, but all of a sudden Poe's holding him away again. “Wait,” he's saying, “I don't want you to feel like you have to—I don't even know what—but I feel like I just made some kind of demand without meaning to and you're kind of in a state right now and I don't—“

“I don't owe you anything,” Finn says. “Remember?” Poe is wiry and his arms and hands are strong from his hours at the controls, but Finn could easily break out of his grip, drag him close again, which is where he wants him. He stays still. He doesn't want to look away from Poe's face, beard-roughened and tired-eyed, brows set at “anxious”. He wants to kiss first one brow and then the other. Wants to do everything they've already done, but with this new knowledge. “You decide,” Finn says. “I've decided.”

Between the rise and the dive, at the apex, there's a moment where an X-wing hangs motionless. That's what Finn thinks of now, watching Poe's face.

“I've decided too,” Poe says, and it's his turn to stay still as Finn leans forward and kisses him, softly then deeply. When they break the kiss it's to clutch at each other hard, to hang on, for each to feel how solid the other is, and how fragile.

 

*

 

With what's left of his eighteen hours, Finn goes to find Rey and Skywalker for practice. He joins them mid-session and they work together in near-silence until the sweat is rolling off them, even in the cool and breezy day, and Skywalker recommends a rest. Rey and Finn sit on the edge of the training platform, legs swinging, while Skywalker excuses himself, presumably for a piss although he's too dignified to say so. “You were on fire today,” Rey says.

“Yeah, today felt good.” In the Force, his anger and emptiness at Mehnaz's death and his new state with Poe—he doesn't know what to call it, but he knows it's different, better—seemed to equalize and open him up further, intensifying and extending his connection to everything around him. He could tell when Skywalker and Rey were manipulating the energies in the clearing and even, sometimes, knew what they were about to do next. “It's not like seeing the future,” Skywalker had tried to explain. “It's just sensing the way the Force gathers around the present.” Finn had previously (and privately) thought that Skywalker was talking out his ass, but today he's willing to admit that there might be something to it. “You're always good,” he adds. “I love being around when you do what you do.”

“I'm getting better,” she admits. “Luke says it's time for me to start the next level of training. He put it in a fancier-sounding way, but basically it was that.”

“Do you feel better? You know, more confident?” He doesn't want to mention Kylo Ren out loud if she doesn't.

“A bit, yeah. It's really better when--” she breaks off, seeing Skywalker reenter the clearing. His posture suggests he's gearing up to say something, and Finn abruptly feels the chill of the breeze on his sweaty skin, a prickle of anticipation.

“Before we get back to work,” Skywalker says, “there's something I want to talk with Finn about,” and he turns the focus of those eyes, so blue and strange, on Finn. “Did Rey tell you it's time for her to undergo the Initiate Trials?”

Finn very carefully does not look at Rey as he says, “Yeah, she just mentioned it.”

“I'd like you to prepare for them as well,” Skywalker says, and when Rey shoots him a very obvious look, amends, “to consider preparing for them. You and Rey work well together, and I could stand here for a few hours praising your courage and your determination and your strength in the Force, but we have lots more to do today. So I'll just ask you to think about it. Rey and I will leave for an uninhabited moon in a tenday—the work we need to do will be easier with no other people around—and I want you to--” he shoots Rey a look in return--“ _consider_ coming with us.”

“What would be the purpose of me doing...that?” At this point he doesn't think he can say “Initiate Trials” with a straight face.

“If you and Rey face Kylo Ren together,” Skywalker says, “I believe you'll have a better chance.”

And oh, it's a trap after all, because what is he going to say to that? _No, let her face him alone?_ She's vibrating next to him, holding herself back. He says, “I need to think about it. Talk to Rey about it, and the Intelligence teams, and Poe. I can't decide right now.”

“Of course not,” Skywalker says. “Take a few days and let me know.” He makes a “get up” gesture. “For now, let's get back to work.”

The pace of the second half of their session is even more intense, and by the end of it they're wrung out and ravenous. “Let's get _food,”_ Rey says, tugging at him.

“Yeah, good, but I have to eat fast. I'm back on duty in an hour and half.”

“Won't be a problem,” Rey says, and he glances at her sideways. This is new; she never jokes about food. _All of us are changing,_ he thinks.

They fill their plates. Rey doesn't talk while she's eating, but when she's done funneling food into her mouth in an uninterrupted stream, and Finn is eating his bowl of stew and rehydrated root powder more slowly, she says, “You're thinking about the training?”

“I can't decide until I talk to some people. I did say that.”

“You also said that one of those people was me. So talk to me.”

“It's not just the training,” Finn says. “You want me to fight this way, fight with you—I mean, beside you. Right? You want me to join your part of the fight.”

“Right,” she says, eyeing the bluish cake at the edge of his plate. He nudges it toward her, and she pounces.

“That's why it's gonna take me a second to decide. I have to think if I can be more useful here, or in the field with Poe, or out there with you, or what.” When he mentions Poe, she actually stops chewing. “Rey,” he says, “are you mad at me about something to do with Poe? Is that what you were angry about the other night? Whenever I mention him lately, you act weird.”

“It doesn't have anything to do with anything,” she says around the cake.

“I don't know what that means. Please tell me.”

“There isn't any point in my telling you,” she says. “That's what it means. You're not going to stop wanting to be around him, and—and—and putting him first.” That last, she says in a rush. “So it doesn't matter what I say about it.”

Finn is silent, processing this new information. He's pretty sure that Rey doesn't feel about him the way that he and Poe feel about each other. But if she feels as _much_ about him, and thinks he doesn't feel as much about her, and wants him to—wants him to prove it somehow—

It can't be about that. His decision. It has to be about what's good for the Resistance, for the people and the possibilities that the Resistance is trying to protect.

But it also can't _not_ be about that, because they're people. All the protection, all the fighting, all the decision-making has to be done by people. He realizes he's been staring at Rey for a long time. “You're my friend,” he says. “I really don't know what the right move is here, I really have to think about it, but I promise I'll remember that.” She looks unimpressed, or maybe just unconvinced.

 

*

 

Statura frowns at him across the desk, which Finn suspects he only uses so that he can frown at people across it; mostly he seems to do his work on his datapad while walking around and somehow never bumping into anything. “This isn't exactly the best time for this request. As you know. All our other analysts have their plates full, and without Mehnaz--”

“I did think about this,” Finn says. The mention of Mehnaz seems like a low blow, but one he deserves, probably. “Chie's getting pretty good at spotting what needs to get spotted, and I think if we work together on everything I'm handling for a couple of months they'll be up to speed, at least enough to take a few cycles on their own while Poe and I head out. Actually, I want to train them whether or not I go back in the field.”

“You want to watch it with Dameron,” Statura says.

 _I'd rather just watch him,_ it's on the tip of Finn's tongue to say, and if he were Poe he probably would, but he just puts on a face like he expects the next thing Statura says to justify his position.

“He's slippery,” Statura's going on, and _that_ brings a mental image that Finn—well, if he's honest he doesn't exactly mind it, but he would rather not be having it at this precise moment. “Hard to pin down.”

 _Damn, fuck, not helping._ Out loud he says, “I don't want to pin him down, I just want to work with him.”

“I had grasped that,” Statura says. “All right. Work in depth with Chie on the Taanab and the Holdrin Protectorate operations, cross-check with Rishy and with me, and if Dameron survives this next strike you can take the Lantillian Sector operation together—that seems like it'll be up your street, and it should be ready to roll out at about that time.”

“Fair enough,” Finn says, because in the Resistance you don't have to thank someone for giving you permission to do your work or risk your life. That _if Dameron survives_ was another dig he didn't really need—he knows the average life expectancy for pilots perfectly well, thank you. Until he's in the training rooms punching off some of his restraint on the heavy bag, it doesn't occur to him that Statura, too, might prefer Poe to come back alive, and be afraid that he might not.

 

*

 

He conveys the gist of his conversation with Statura to Poe, who's due to fly out with the squadrons in six days: another departure. Poe seems pleased, commenting only that Statura must be getting flexible, not to say soft, in his old age.

“He's not that much older than you,” Finn points out. “What, ten years?”

“Fourteen, thanks very much.”

“Did you have a problem with him? Or--”

“Or a thing? Yeah, we had a thing. On-again, off-again, when I first got here. He didn't _say_ that, did he?”

“He gets more sarcastic when your name comes up.”

“That's not surprising,” Poe says, scratching his calf with his other foot. They're in bed, sweaty and temporarily content, postponing the evil moment when they have to un-entwine and shower off and go about their respective days. Finn needs to tell Rey his decision today, and he's dreading it. He waits to see if Poe has anything to add about Statura and their history, and then says as much.

Poe doesn't respond right away. When he does, he asks warily, “Would you rather? Do that?”

“No. But I'm worried it's not the right call. Or that I'm making it because I wanna be with you, and not because it's the right call.”

“You can't expect me to object to that too hard.”

“I do though,” Finn says. “If you thought it was the wrong call, you'd tell me.”

This causes Poe to kiss him, which he didn't expect, but is more than fine with. It derails both the conversation and the getting-up plans for a while. “I hope I would,” Poe says eventually. “Yeah, I probably would. Not that I do. Think it's the wrong call, I mean. But I also know if it's better for you to go, you'll go.” This time Finn's the one to lean up and over, get Poe's lower lip in his teeth with just a bit of pressure, and hold on.

They do manage to make it out of the bed finally. Poe heads over to Tactical for more briefing and Finn, dressing slowly, walking slowly, thinking slowly, heads over to the raised platform where he and Rey practice.

When he gets there, she's floating gently, about a meter between her and the floor. Her eyes are closed, one foot propped on the opposite thigh. It's a matter for wonder, for awe: Finn forgets to breathe, forgets he has a body, remembering it only when the muscles under his scar start to cramp.

She sinks to the platform, opens her eyes, and stands. “Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

“Luke's talking with Leia,” she says casually. “He said he'd be a bit late,” and then the smile breaks through. “From across the base, he said that!”

“And you heard him! That's terrific!” He hops up onto the platform and hugs her. “That's new, right?”

“New these last two days!” He's reminded, almost painfully, of the moment they escaped Jakku and met in the middle of the Falcon, overwhelmed with relief, so impressed and delighted by what they'd done that they could hardly stand it. They face each other, grinning. She says, “You wanna try it?”

“What, thinking something to you? I doubt it'll work, I'm nowhere near as strong as you are even.”

“But you're right here,” she argues. “That's got to be much easier. C'mon, try it. Start like meditating.”

Finn closes his eyes, drops his defenses, breathes. Tries to project a clear and single thought: _You looked great up there._

“Not happening,” Rey says after a while. “Oh well. It'll come with practice, maybe.”

He'd been hoping it would work, Finn realizes, so that maybe he wouldn't have to say out loud what he says now: “I'm not going with you.”

Her face changes, and this too is overlaid with memory: the time he tried to leave without her. The time they took her away. He came to find her then, and he wills her to believe that this isn't an ending, as that wasn't. But he knows she can't hear him.

“Because of Poe,” she says, not as a question.

“It doesn't have anything—well. It has a little to do with Poe. But it's not just that. I don't want to be a Jedi. I don't want to use the Force the way you use it, I don't want the kind of power you have. I'm not even sure I _could_ have it.”

“Are you saying there's something bad about the way I use it? Because let me tell you, the way I use it saved your--” She freezes, covers her mouth with her hands, and the sounds coming from behind them are just intelligible: “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

“I wasn't saying anything like that.” Now he just feels tired, and the tears that flow from him easily and silently—in the helmets, no one could tell you were crying as long as you kept quiet—are flowing now. Rey almost never cries. A waste of water, she said once. “I know you saved me. You gave me my life back.”

“And you have to do what you think is best with it,” she says. “I understand. I just don't--” Her hands clench. “I don't want to face him alone.”

“You won't have to. If you don't want to. If I'm still alive when you fight him, and you want me there, I'll be with you.”

“But without the training--” She doesn't need to say _He'll brush you aside;_ he doesn't need the Force to see her thinking it. He says, “At least I could slow him down.”

“You're talking about _dying_ for me. I don't want that! I want you to be able to protect yourself.”

“I didn't die last time. And I protected you, too, for a minute anyway. Maybe I'll be lucky again. C'mere?” He folds her into his arms again, and she hangs on. “I can't walk away from everybody here,” he says, “not to be just okay at being a Jedi. I can fight better here, this is the right way for me. But for you it's not walking away. This is the best thing you could do, 'cause you're gonna be the best. And if you need me to back you up I will.”

“If you're still alive.”

“If I'm still alive,” he agrees. They're much the same height, but she's tucked her head into his neck, and her hair smells good, a healthy shining animal smell overlaid by whatever she washes it in. He mashes his face down into it. “Let's practice,” he says to the crown of her head. “We don't need Skywalker for that, we can get started.”

“He wants you to call him Luke. He said so.”

“Yeah,” Finn says, “but I don't want to.”

She laughs, a little shakily, and they begin.

 

*

 

It's just before dawn. The air is damp and raw; all lights are haloed. “Can you even see to take off?”

“This is what we have instruments for. _And_ astromechs,” Poe adds in response to BB-8's indignant burble. “Go get in position, B, I have to say goodbye to Finn.” The little droid rolls off grumbling. “Lantillian Sector,” Poe says. “Two months-ish?”

“Yeah, but you'll be back before then, right?”

Poe frowns. “Who do you have on deck if I don't make it?”

“Esdras Don or Mazique.”

“They're good,” Poe says, “but they're not as good as me.”

“No,” Finn says, “and I don't think about them all the time, or know just how to cover them for an approach, or trust them to land us on a two-credit piece. And I don't think their eyes are pretty. And I don't do this with them.” He cups Poe's chin for a kiss, and Poe's arms go around him.

“Tighter,” Finn says, out loud, and Poe, awake, squeezes him harder, all the weird buckles and attachments of the flight suit digging into Finn's chest. “When you get back, we'll do so much, we'll do everything, I'm gonna keep you in our room for three days straight and then when we're ready we'll fly out together, and we'll go over the plan and any new intel on the way there--” He's out of breath, and Poe takes advantage of the pause to kiss him again, which doesn't do much for his oxygen intake.

“I love you,” Poe says, pulling back. “That's the word for all those things you were talking about, in case you were wondering.”

Finn rolls his eyes. “I know,” he says, “I know that,” and to soften it—although Poe doesn't look hurt, particularly—he kisses Poe with everything he has. Keeps him there for a long minute, and steps back, and says, “See you soon.”

He watches Poe strap in, watches him lift off. When the squadron's out of sight, he turns to go find Rey. They have a few more days to practice together before she leaves.

 


End file.
